Back to School: 28 Easy Inkscape Tutorials

No matter how advanced or novice of an Inkscape user you may be, the basics are absolutely essential. Let's go over some of the best Inkscape tutorials and courses to get caught up on everything you need to know.

Basic Tools and Methods

There's plenty of tools and methods to become overwhelming, so these are the tutorials you'll want to take a look at for learning the foundation of Inkscape.

The Polygon tool in Inkscape has a slight learning curve, but can be an
excellent way to speed up the creation of complex shapes. In this quick
tip, we'll go over some neat tricks to make the Polygon tool more useful
with your designs.

The first time you open Inkscape, it may take a while to finally
discover gradients. When you do, they can be rather overwhelming and
confusing at first. Check out this quick tip to learn some tricks with
Inkscape's gradients, Gradient Editor, and Gradient Tool. While I'm
using linear gradients in this tutorial, the same principals apply to
radial gradients.

The fact that Group/Ungroup and Combine/Break Apart are two sets of
complete synonyms, you might not think that Inkscape would have these as
separate functions. While these are pretty similar at first, I'll show
you just how different they actually are.

There are so many things to learn when it comes to nodes, but this quick
tip should get you on the right track to properly using and
manipulating your nodes, and ultimately, your artwork in Inkscape. Let's
check out some neat tips and tricks with nodes!

So you've spent hours on end drawing a magnificent design in Inkscape
and now you want to publish it once and for all! Thankfully, Inkscape
has a ton of options to export your artwork to more friendly and
compatible file types. We'll also go over a couple of neat tricks you
might not have known.

When you begin doing some serious work in Inkscape, you're going to want
to keep your work properly aligned. Let's go over a few cool things
with Inkscape's Align and Distribute to make your designs as
professional as they can get!

As soon as you open the filters menu in Inkscape, you'll notice that
there's a ton of them! When filters are introduced, they present a lot
of quick and easy ways to make advanced drawings. Let's learn about a
few useful filters, the filter editor, and check out some cool design
ideas.

I love tapered lines in Inkscape because you can make them as simple as
you want, or as complicated as you need them. This quick tip will go
over the basics of tapered lines, using the Path Effect Editor, and a
neat drawing comprised of tapered lines entirely.

Clipping and Masking are fantastic little operations that can make your
complicated objects conform to another element of your design by
changing their entire shape quickly and easily. Let's go over the
differences, benefits, and some neat tricks in this quick tip.

There's a lot that goes into brush strokes in Inkscape, but it pays off
with beautiful results. Let's break down the many options available for
brush strokes in Inkscape and also go over a few tricks that are sure to
keep brush strokes part of your designing.

Once you start creating more elaborate designs in Inkscape, you'll
probably find yourself struggling to click certain things without
selecting something else. This is where Layers come in. Let's go over
this simple menu and how to use it (along with a couple tricks).

These three ways of creating identical artwork may sound similar, but
they all have completely different uses. Let's go over duplicate, clone,
and copy and paste in Inkscape to see which ones fits best in each
situation.

In this quick tip, we're going to go over a tool called Create Tiled
Clones. It's a very useful menu with tons of options for creating large
amounts of identical, yet dynamic objects, such as patterns. It can be
used for so many things, but let's just dive right in!

Before you think Inkscape doesn't have something, check the Extensions
menu. You'll be surprised to see that there are a bunch of these
additional dialog menus - and they're pretty helpful most of the time.
Let's look at Visualize Path in this Inkscape quick tip.

In this Inkscape quick tip, we're going to go over a neat object menu option called Objects to Marker. It's a really neat way to use custom designs if the prepacked ones just don't cut it. Let's jump right in!

There are a ton of ways to draw in Inkscape, but sometimes you need to
bring in reinforcements to really get that special shape. Sure, you
could probably freehand it just fine, but we're going to go over a tool
that allows a controlled the controlled use of warping and sculpting.

If you've worked with advanced drawing in Inkscape before, you may have
noticed that Inkscape starts to seriously slow down. In this quick tip,
we'll go over a few ways to get your document back up to speed.

Tutorials for Beginners

In this tutorial, we'll be designing a cool pair of sunglasses. These
sunglasses use a lot of different shapes comprised from multiple
techniques throughout Inkscape. We'll cover simple things such as
drawing shapes, to some more complex things like path operations. So,
how about we jump right in?

In this tutorial, we'll be using basic shapes in Inkscape to create a
hedgehog character. We'll also go over some neat concepts such as custom
tapered lines, random object scattering, and shape manipulation.

Today we'll be learning how to create a vector light bulb icon with the
free, open source vector program Inkscape. We'll be following a Tango
style of design for this project. Read on to learn more about the Tango
Desktop Project and to learn how to create this icon.

Video Courses on Inkscape

As of now, there are 2 great video courses that cover the basics and advanced in Inkscape. With more than 90 minutes of pure learning goodness in each course, these lessons are sure to make you a pro.

In this course, we'll be getting into some of the more advanced tools,
menus, and methods for vector design. This is a great course for those
who want to expand from their basic understanding of Inkscape.

Class Dismissed!

So there's our great list of fantastic tutorials. For beginners and advanced users alike, this will be a great way to learn Inkscape or at least brush up on the basics. Thanks for reading!